>I agree wholeheartedly. The fact is that the use of orbs and other open
>relay databases seem totally ineffective in reducing UCE volume.
Well, it depends on the situation. A business running their own
mailserver, for example, may want to block based on most of the databases
to minimize spam.
With 20 or so DNS-based spam databases to choose from, you can find the
ones that block the most spam while blocking the least amount of legitimate
mail. There is no one "right" answer. And some people, of course, prefer
not to have any E-mail blocked.
That's one of the reasons we offer per-user and per-domain control with our
anti-spam software.
>I have heard hundreds of complaints from other customers
>complaining of the blocking of legit e-mail.
If you block on all the ORBS tests, there's a good chance that will
happen. But, if you block on the ORBS test without knowing what it is and
what it does, you're asking for trouble.
> From my viewpoint, an ISP opens itself to one big class-action lawsuit by
> claiming
>it is aggressively censuring e-mail.
Not if either it is part of the contract, or you allow users to "opt out"
of the scanning (or better, "opt in" to it).
>Some of this spam contains links to what are
>claimed to be sites containing images of "underage teenage sluts", for
>example.
I'm just as concerned by the larger amounts of porno spam being sent to
children. We estimate that about 1,000,000,000 (yes, BILLION) E-mails are
sent per year to children under 18 soliciting porno sites. That's 46,000+
hours a year that children spend deleting those E-mails, if it takes just 4
seconds to deal with them.
>As a former ISP owner I see the potential for very costly legal action
>against ISP's claiming to be successfully censuring unacceptable
>e-mail via use of these "wonderful" databases.
A lot depends on what they claim, what techniques they use to find spam,
and whether or not the users have a say in what is being filtered.
For example, I can't imagine any court in the U.S. would rule against an
ISP that adds X-RBL-Warning: headers to E-mail to mark them as spam, for
the recipient to filter on.
>BTW: Not one single UCE has ever been originated or relayed from either of
>my sendmail servers.
Out of curiousity, what do you do to prevent origination of UCE from your
sendmail servers?
-Scott
Declude: Anti-spam and Anti-virus solutions for IMail. http://www.declude.com
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